Old junk or treasure?

Every item on this mantelpiece tells a story, says Christine Finn, who photographed it while clearing her late parents' home. Our mantels are the closest thing we have to shrines and make the everyday seem precious

Old junk or treasure?

Every item on this mantelpiece tells a story, says Christine Finn, who photographed it while clearing her late parents' home. Our mantels are the closest thing we have to shrines and make the everyday seem precious

I can't identify the precise moment when I thought, "capture this". As I cleared my family home of 35 years after the deaths of both parents, I paused in front of the sitting-room mantelpiece. On instinct, I photographed it, and looking at the image weeks later, realised the bric-a-brac of china, photographs and dusty paper flowers was not just a collection of sundry bits, but a document. Here, in all its unique, mismatched glory, was the story of my family. The Romans had their lares and penates, the household gods at the hearth; we have an equivalent in the mantel as a fixed place and focal point, even if the "votives" are secular and come in a bag from Ikea. Every object in the home tells a story, but the mantel is a place to perform, a paradise for people-watching, where the gilt-edged "stiffy" and the Mother's Day card can be fighting for space with the spare set of car keys and the TV remote.

On the beige tiles of my parents' 1950s fire surround, objects gathered in peace over decades of family changes; the room was never redecorated after we moved in, so the blue floral backdrop simply faded. On the gas-fire ledge, an extra mantel, there are daffodils. Past their prime, they date this image to March, a month that saw the passings of not just my parents, but grandparents, aunts and uncles. The blue vase was one of my last gifts to my mother. The frame in front has a photograph of my paternal grandparents: Charles Finn, a miner who came from the Clyde in the 1920s to dig the Kent coalfields, and his wife, Annie. (My father was one of seven children; my mother an only child, as I am.)

Behind that is my parents' wedding photograph, taken in Ickenham, west London. My mother is wearing a smart 1950s suit and a corsage. In the other frame is my mother's mother, Annie Gething, raising a glass in a bar in Jersey, where they lived. She was, and remains, my role model. Widowed young when her husband, an army officer in Africa, died of malaria, she stayed on Jersey through the occupation to save the family home. The floral pot was something I brought back from Poland. Inside it is the usual accumulation of loose change and safety pins. The paper floral display probably came from a church fete, or one of the many concerns that my mother volunteered for. She found it hard to settle in Deal, in Kent, and threw herself into days so busy she was hardly ever at home.

On the mantelpiece itself, the Remembrance Day poppy reminds me not only of my mother's charity collecting but of the little-spoken-of loss of her father when she was 13. The china crinoline lady and the plate behind, the red glasses, the old lady figurine and the ginger jar, all appeared on the mantelpiece over the years, and their story is lost. The card at the back is poignant. It is a get-well card I gave my father when he first became ill with Parkinson's disease. It is an unashamedly soppy card: a large bear in bed. It stayed there 12 years until his death in 2004, and remained even as the bereavement cards were placed on and removed from the mantelpiece.

I grew up in a house with few books, just a car manual, cookbook and road maps, but my father - a clerk for Pfizer pharmaceuticals - told me stories from his imagination. As his illness progressed, he struggled to tell the stories stacking up in his mind. But he loved my travels, the postcards and the objects I brought back, and my own tales when I took a break from journalism to study archaeology. I brought back the alabaster model Taj Mahal from Delhi. Next to it is a blue floral enamel box from China. Almost out of sight, from the same trip, is a small copy of a Terracotta Army soldier, bought from the site in Xian in the late 1980s. I was travelling with my then husband and we bought lots of tiny soldiers and horses. Somewhere in the many moves I've had since then, they all disappeared. I found it touching that my family mantelpiece, reliably fixed, had saved something so precious.

There is more decorative china and the usual clutter of paper, and a card for one of my mother's 83 birthdays. But this arrangement is so much about my mother as a wife; all the red and pink flowers and the blue china heart makes this an unashamedly romantic mantelpiece, a reminder of a couple who almost made their golden anniversary. Their relationship was sometimes tempestuous but they shared a deep bond. My father spent his last years in a care home, and my mother died soon after, her failed heart broken. Photos of me were kept on a side table. I don't have children and now wonder where they would have put their grandchildren's photographs.

Shortly after my mother's death in 2006, I made a programme for BBC Radio 3 called Leaving Home. I walked around the house and simply told these sorts of family stories. It was a cathartic experience: each object released not one narrative but generations of them. And they stopped at me. Clearing the house was not going to be easy. Everything mattered. There was a poignancy in my mother's final yellow washing-up gloves, and a tea caddy on which my father had written in black felt tip: "Phyllis, two bags only, PLEASE", a testament to our financial state rather than any taste for mahogany-coloured tea.

Just after I took the photograph, I cleared the mantel, excavating from left to right, placing everything in boxes, now kept in paid storage, in suspended animation. Reconstructing it now would be impossible. Even with all the disparate physical elements, what is missing is the invisible, familial thread binding each object to the others over time.

I enlarged the image, framed it and hung it over the same fireplace as part of an art exhibit. I suggested visiting schoolchildren could go home and do the same. The number who said they didn't have a mantelpiece got me thinking. This mantel is domestic biography, where tricky relationships are articulated in the artful placing of objects, photos and things to show off. It's also a practical place. For every mantel bristling with formal invitations, there will be another brimming with child life - school reports and photos, homemade calendars and cards. The mantel is a landscape of lost and random objects. Outsiders judging a family by their mantel array tread into fact and fiction. The language of the mantel is private code.

What happens when there is divorce, or other family upheaval? I have had dozens of mantelpieces over the years, and I have no record of any, except glimpsed as a backdrop. After divorce, I sold my house, went to university and spent 12 years living in various places for barely more than a year. I can remember the mantel itself (dark marble in a Georgian bedsit in Dublin, Californian redwood in San Jose) but not the contents. Nowhere was home enough to establish the type of mantel I had known from childhood.

But there was a fascination. In 2000, I was in Silicon Valley writing a book about its culture. The mantelpiece in a techies' apartment was a trophy shelf of geek toys, including several Pez dispensers, Linux penguins, a tin of spam and, oddly as the fire was never lit, firelighters. When the dotcoms crashed, the flatmates moved on, to opposite sides of America.

Where mantelpieces have disappeared, what are their equivalents? Can such a particular composition sit comfortably around a television set? Do fridge-magnets or screen-savers display the images today?

My family mantel grew for years, but do others change with the decor? Is the old arrangement retained, or is this the time to play mantel squabble and move a photo to make a point, obscure an object, or elevate a show-off souvenir? How much is the mantelpiece to store things they keep losing? Are the keys always next to the clock?

"You want to hear a mantelpiece story?" said my neighbour when I casually mentioned the project. His eyes flashed back 50 years, to the day his brother ran five miles home to say they had won big time on the pools, around £100,000 - a fortune in the 1960s. The coupon was always left ready for posting beside the clock on the family mantel. And it was still there as he went to share the news with his mother, who had forgotten to post it. "Think of how different our lives would have been," said this man, who from that day on only trusts his letters to the main postbox.

Another neighbour remembers the school dinner money behind the mantel clock, and a brother, who died young, whose fingers would deftly turn off the clock's annoying chime.

My local newsagent has just had a mantelpiece installed in his new house - "it's just not a home without one." He was brought up with a carriage clock in the centre of the mantel. His own one is pristine, featuring some Poole pottery - and a clock in the centre.

I mentioned mantelpieces to a woman at the Saturday market. She said she had just moved to her first house without fireplaces. She was selling off her mantel contents right there, on her stall, bits of once-precious crockery and souvenirs from abroad. Another friend, the Beat Hotel photo-grapher Harold Chapman, gave me a wonderful list of his mantel contents, which included the childhood excitement of a would-be meteorite.

How much can we read into the assemblage? It's a long way from a pebble-dashed semi in Deal to Mongolia, but as I pondered my family mantel, I recalled the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey describing the interior of a yurt and the symbolism of the hearth. The hearth is a potent image, but what about random objects that get caught up in this domestic biography; the accretion of notes, receipts, odd buttons, broken jewellery, stamps, passport photos, lists, fridge magnets and half a dog chew? Given that the mantels in show-houses are invariably neat and almost bare, is a cluttered or a pristine mantel a defining place in the property search? Can it clinch or sink a choice of new home?

I am still living in my family house, for the moment, and I have that same childhood mantelpiece all to myself. I have painted the fireplace white and the walls the same. My sense of family is so different to my parents'. I am the last in my line, and my mantel speaks for itself. It is - unconsciously or otherwise - Zen-like. What I put on it are temporary objects - stones, shells, driftwood, bleached bone. There is always a candle, flowers, a postcard of some art. Sometimes it seems to grow. But never enough for it to be excavated in quite the same way.

• What does your mantelpiece say about you - and your family? Please send photographs of your mantelpiece and a short account of the objects on it to family@theguardian.com and write "mantelpiece" in the subject field